Online report of the Progressive Review. For 54 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

May 15, 2016

Obama's non-political problems

From our overstocked archives

Sam Smith, 2013 - I plan to
vote for Barack Obama despite considering him a pretty lousy and reactionary
president. I’ll be doing this because I don’t consider presidential elections a
choice of leaders but of battlefields. I also believe that in such elections, poker
is a better guide than virtue. Obama is the best bet for a lousy hand.

That said,
with eight months left to go, I’d like to get something off my chest
while it’s still relatively safe to say things like this. I not only don’t like
Obama’s politics, I don’t like him all that much either. And I’m convinced that
I’m not alone and that a major part of Obama’s problem is not political but
personal.

I was
reminded of this watching that video of Harvard law school student later president
Obama lecturing his classmates. I was surprised that even at such a young age
he was so preachy and didactic, albeit combined with the occasional and
thoroughly scripted moment of light humor. It is as though he has gone through
his entire life standing behind a virtual pulpit and teleprompter, where he
berates, grates and irritates.

There are
several things wrong with this: for one thing it carries the subtext – you
might call it critical speech theory if you were at Harvard Law - that the
listener is not as bright as the speaker and, for another, it gets boring
pretty quickly. Obama typically assumes the role of a professor, which leaves
the listener in the position of a student rather than of a fellow citizen.

While the
view of many towards Obama is driven by antipathy towards his ethnicity, I
suspect there are many more, like me, who hear in Obama not the voice of
blackness but of Harvard Law School, a robot of rigorously rehearsed
rationality who seems somehow incapable of normal conversation, passion or
beliefs.

It is the
sound of otohbotoh – on the one hand, but on the other hand. It is the
sound of data without dreams, of citations without soul, of examination without
empathy, and anecdotes seemingly pulled from a TV commercial rather than from
real life.

I also sense
in Obama the character of someone who from an early age was told repeatedly
that he was greater than, in fact, he was. This narcissism occasionally spills
out, such as in comparisons of himself with other presidents or speaking of
what he is going to do without any reference to Congress’ constitutional role
in the matter.

Obama lalso grew
up in a culture in which data, legal details, management procedures, and
presumed process takes precedence over what is actually accomplished. His
administration reflects this in a two thousand page healthcare bill and a
prescription for a nationalelectronic
health database with so little concern for privacy. And soon, his solicitor
general will be defending this bill before the Supreme Court,arguing the superiority of a commerce clause
that only lawyers can love over the rest of our Constitution. But, in the end,
esoteric legal arguments don’t change many votes.

Further, to
exercise the aforementioned skills, it is necessary that the federal government
become a haven for law and business school graduates, data demons and process
pushers. We’ve been headed this way a long time, and Obama is only the most
recent and most exaggerated of the lot, but you get little sense he values
anything that stems from actual experience, pragmatic suggestion, or advisers
who are wise, inspired, or sensitive. He doesn’t even seem to like to talk with
people from the Hill.

Further, with Obama, one gets the sense that states and localities are
just part of the problem. Think how different this election might be if Chris
Christie and other governors and mayors had gotten their names on, and credit
for, the stimulus package.

I’m not
talking Tenth Amendment here, but rather political common sense. A good
politician knows how to share power. Obama has no feel for this.

Further,if Obama and his wife have any sizable number
of friends not dependent on power and political circumstances, it is a well
kept secret. People without unpowerful friends are people to be careful of.

Finally,
Obama is not honest. Not in a slimy way, like, say, a former Arkansas governor,
but in an intellectually manipulative fashion. He frequently seems to be
attempting to dredge up some verbal slick trick that willget him through the evening news, but it just
reinforces the idea that he is not someone you can count on. It began with his
presidential campaign, which portrayed him as a liberal, which he certainly
wasn’t. He was, in fact, elected by conning the most number of voters in recent
American history.

I could, of
course, vote Green. But I try to keep religion and politics separate. One
demands pure virtue, the other just tries to give virtue another leg up.And history teaches us that it is the
grassroots organizing of third parties, not their presidential campaigns, that
change the country.

Besides, we
are in a time when our political system is so remarkably rigged that the answer
lies not in playing the gangsters’ game but by finding an ever increasing
number of ways to create new struggles with new rules, such as the Occupiers
have recently demonstrated.

So before
you get too upset with the foregoing, remember that I plan to vote for Obama.
I’ll just be damned, however, if I’m going to brag about it.

1 comment:

Anonymous
said...

'Lesser Evilism', political strategy, or, to elaborate upon Herman & Chomsky, Extorting Consent? Isn't that really more to the point, this casting votes based on reasons essentially derived through fear and abandoned faith? For isn't it truly that, the abandonment of conviction, belief, and ideals? And is this not then, in sum, equivalent to the discarding and casting away of ethics? When votes are cast out of fear, absent of conviction, faith, belief, and ethics, by what reason should one expect anything other a fearful, distrusting society fraught with corruption and skepticism? Wisdom of old admonishes----"IN the old days, those who were well versed in the practice of the Tao did not try to enlighten the people, but rather to keep them in the state of simplicity. For, why are the people hard to govern? Because they are too clever! Therefore, he who governs his state with cleverness is its malefactor; but he who governs his state without resorting to cleverness is its benefactor. To know these principles is to possess a rule and a measure. To keep the rule and the measure constantly in your mind is what we call Mystical Virtue. Deep and far-reaching is Mystical Virtue! It leads all things to return, till they come back to Great Harmony!"---Lao Tzu

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for nearly 50 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely.

Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in the 1990s, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

The Review started a web edition in 1995 when there were only 27,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are over 170 million active sites.

In 1987 we ran an article on AIDS. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men died of the disease.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion.

In 1971 we published our first article in support of single payer universal health care